that was enjoyable to watch and a treat to read, thanks :D
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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back when you had to be good with a soldering iron
fucking awesome! here’s the process behind the music video for anyone who missed the video description:
Moving images on a computer! Looks primitive, is primitive, but damn it took a bunch of work to get that far.
This was partly produced on an Amiga 1000. The graphics were painted frame by frame in Deluxe Paint 2, which at that stage was limited to 320 by 200 pixels. My first edition Amiga was sold as a PAL machine but produced an NTSC signal. For both reasons all images had to be re-shot off the computer screen so you see scan lines.
To get the images to move I ran a UNIX style command line tool called LM (or Long Movie) that was on a Fish Disk. This would put a bunch of frames in memory (I had 512Kb) and loop them. So the motion was pretty much drawn blind and could only be a few seconds.
To get the graphics into the machine I HIRED a Digi-View which used a monochrome camera and a wheel with Red Green Blue filters. Each colour took a few seconds.The Amiga was fed into Stephen's vision mixer for things like luma keying and feedback effects. There's also a few minimal treatments with a Fairlight CVI for colouring and trails.
I am pleased with how minimal this gets. Lots of black and few colours.When we went to broadcast this the stations would complain about the sections with pure black which would set off systems for dealing with signal failure. They had to override the fail safes to get it on air.
Halfway through making this the Amiga broke down, and you can see some places which look 'circuit bent' without actually planning it. The computer was broken for about 7 months afterwards - it needed a new motherboard!
the Amiga was infamously very good at doing video effects on a budget — shows like Babylon 5 used a bunch of Amigas for editing, effects, and primitive 3D graphics. to be fair, as a budget toolchain the Amiga was also known for some of the cheesiest effects you know from microbudget 90s TV and VHS garbage. it was a flexible tool that could make art in the right hands (or a thoroughly awful infomercial in, ah, other hands)
Tom’s process is insane and I kind of want to try it! this was almost definitely the least expensive way to do computerized video effects, and a base level A1000 (that was the first Amiga, and he mentions it only had 512k of RAM) had so many constraints to work around! a lot of video production places automated the process of compositing the effects onto video using an expensive (to me, cheap to them) software/hardware toolchain called the Video Toaster, the software portion of which is now open source. I’ve actually been wondering if it’d be difficult to clone the Video Toaster hardware on an FPGA board, with maybe a USB interface instead of Zorro III so even the cheap (keyboard form factor) Amigas could play with one. all for the incredible power to edit and composite onto a low-res NTSC video stream!
Absolutely fascinating.
Severed Heads had two actual record companies at this time, though not really a huge amount of money. (They had some hits in the late '80s and early '90s that were helpful to the bank account for a short time.) So Tom got extremely good at beating the crap out of things.
all of this sounds like my kind of music production. which albums do you recommend starting with from their Bandcamp? (finally my bandcamp account’s getting more play)
"Living Museum" is a live album from the final tour a few years ago, that's good for the pop songs. "Clean" and "Blubberknife" are noise records. Severed Heads started in the late 1970s as Tom making his own tapeloops.
edit: looks like you can't actually buy Living Museum from the site? But you can play it!
nice! I grabbed Clean and Blubberknife; it looks like Living Museum can’t be bought on Bandcamp so I’ll have to look more into that one later. this is a great excuse to start listening to music again with the fancy (for me) audio setup on my desktop
Severed Heads also goes extremely well with headphones, so you can try to work out what that thing is at the top-left of the mix.
it’s time to bust out the good headphones (unironically, these feel like wearing a Fisher Price toy but are the best headphones I own for listening quality)
Tom Ellard's whole history of beating the crap out of technology to make music and vision is very NotAwfulTech
go to https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ and give Tom ten bucks. Nobody ever got fired for buying Severed Heads.